Should Developers Own Quality? The Pros and Cons of Developer Testing

Edward Paulet, Software Engineer at Rainforest, recently sat down with Robert Miller, Success Engineer at Guru, to discuss a trending topic in the agile development and quality world: Should Developers Own Quality? Here a few takeaways from their discussion along with two case studies of what developer testing looks like in organizational practice.

Every Rainforest software developer is a quality owner, meaning they write, execute, and maintain tests for the code they produce. This multi-owner approach to developer-owned QA serves Rainforest's release goals and encourages everyone on the team to be engaged in delivering high-quality products to customer quickly.

The QA process at Rainforest is a collaborative effort between frontend and backend development teams: Frontend developers own testing the user flows using Rainforest, while backend developers own testing the API and maintaining pre-seeded test data.

Without a dedicated QA team, there's no dedicated QA step in the development process, so quality testing is integrated into the workflow. Developers are responsible for writing tests and maintaining them with the support of the product team. By collaborating on quality at every stage of the development process, Rainforest's product and engineering teams work together to ensure features meet team and customer requirements.

Rainforest DevX:

QA can be the bane of development teams who don't have a dedicated QA team. That's not the case with Guru, where Success Engineer Rob Miller has optimized Rainforest for efficient developer-owned testing. In the webinar, Rob discussed how he developed a process to integrate Rainforest as directly as possible into his team's workflow:

I came up with a way to write tests as JavaScript code, covert them to RFML files, then upload them to Rainforest using their CLI.

- Rob Miller, Success Engineer at Guru

By using RFML files and Rainforest's CLI Rob avoids repeating steps in different areas that require the same action. This reduces the amount of time he spends writing and maintaining Rainforest tests and increases his capacity to work on production support and feature development.

The biggest benefit of using RFML files with Rainforest's CLI is having the ability to search all text in every Rainforest test, making it quick and easy to find the location of the broken code to fix it. The Guru team also gets version control and pull request benefits by having these files in GitHub.

Learn About the Pros and Cons of Developer-Owned Quality

Rob and Edward agree that developer-owned testing saves an enormous amount of time in the workflow. But, developer resources are overextended and expensive. Time spent on developer-owned QA is time taken from developing new product features. To learn more about the pros and cons of developer-owned quality listen on-demand to Should Developers Own Quality? Pros and Cons of Developer Testing.